My Hottest Take

I love an epistolary novel. I talk about that a lot on this channel, Dracula being the most obvious example and probably to this day the best example of very successful epistolary mechanic being used in a piece of fiction.

House of Leaves is a very complex piece of fiction, but the dialogue is written in such a juvenile way as to feel like somehow it was written both by a mathematician who wanted to create a puzzle in the form of a book and by a 12-year-old boy who'd never written anything before and just wanted to be edgy.

And also, the style of dialogue and the characters themselves, it's all so threadbare and awkward, and I'll say it again, juvenile and edgelord. The tone and style of this book did not work for me whatsoever.

So, the final quarter of this book makes it all worth it. But, the only reason I stuck it out and got that far is because Jo Nesbø didn't make the first three quarters too painful.